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MEDAMAHANUWARA, Sri Lanka — Past the end of a remote mountain road, down a rutted dirt track, in a concrete house that lacked running water but bristled with smartphones, 13 members of an extended family were glued to Facebook. And they were furious. A family member, a truck driver, had died after a beating the month before. It was a traffic dispute that had turned violent, the authorities said. But on Facebook, rumors swirled that his assailants were part of a Muslim plot to wipe out the country’s Buddhist majority. dfkghdkflgjlkjfgldfkjglsfkdg skgjhsdkgjhskgjhsdkjghskdjghsdkjg skjdfhskjdfhskdjfhskjdfhsdkjfhsdkjf skdjfhsdkjfhskdjfhkdsjfhskdjfhsdjf “We don’t want to look at it because it’s so painful,” H.M. Lal, a cousin of the victim, said as family members nodded. “But in our hearts there is a desire for revenge that has built.”

TRAUNSTEIN, Germany — The rumor began, as so many do these days, on Facebook A group of Muslim refugees in southern Germany, it was claimed, had dragged an 11-year-old girl to a pedestrian underpass and raped her. When the police denied the claim, it was said that politicians beholden to the European Union had ordered them to cover up the assault. The rumor proved unfounded, but it provoked waves of fear and anger as it was pushed out across Germany by Facebook’s News Feed. Users worked one another up into fits, concluding that these dangerous refugees, and the duplicitous politicians who shielded them, would all have to be thrown out. In most of the world, rumor-fueled meltdowns are taken as a fact of life, a product of Facebook’s propensity for stirring up people’s worst impulses. But Andreas Guske, a trim, steely-eyed police inspector in the refugee-heavy Bavarian town of Traunstein where the rumor circulated, didn’t think his community could afford complacence. Atta